


A Stronger Woman

by Serindrana



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/F, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How can one woman have so much of a hold on Athenril, even after all these years?</p>
<p>Simple: Because she deserves to.</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>H/C post-game fic, set several years after DA2. Contains graphic depictions of the aftermath of abuse and neglect, as well as serious medical procedures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stronger Woman

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [An Unlikely Balm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/489173) by [MsBarrows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsBarrows/pseuds/MsBarrows). 



Athenril is just coming down off of a tense exchange in the back streets of Montfort when she sees her. All the rushing, lovely adrenaline sours in a breath, and Athenril thinks to turn away. This isn’t, after all, her problem anymore. The girl stopped being her charge years ago. The girl disappeared with her sister years ago. Athenril is halfway to old age now, anyway, and to break a line of templars-

But there are no templars around Bethany Hawke. There’s only the girl, hands bound palm to palm and mouth gagged, eyes lolling in exhausted disorientation, skin mottled and pocked from who knew what. She sags against the wall of a house that has only known squatters for years.

There are no templars. Athenril narrows her eyes and slips closer to the alleyway entrance, then climbs to the low roof for a better vantage.  _No templars_. Are they off taking a leak somewhere? Drinking and joking while their charge rots?

Or maybe there are just  _no templars_. Maybe there was another, more important call. Maybe it wasn’t templars at all that had bound her.

Athenril bites back a groan and slides back down to the street. Of anybody to come back from her past, of course it would be Bethany. Hawke has her tethered still. _Damn it_.

 

—-

“Clear out,” Athenril barks as she drags the weight of Bethany into the narrow, labyrinthian spaces of the current safe house. One or two of her newer lackies raises protest, but the others - two who followed her all the way from Kirkwall, two others who joined her somewhere along the road in the years past - hurry them away. What little noise there was fades. Athenril hefts Bethany’s dead weight against her side once more, and pulls her into what is, at the moment, her room.

There’s no hot water to wash Bethany’s skin, and Athenril doesn’t feel like building a fire, so she uses cold water to wash the dirt from her. Bethany shivers, but is otherwise silent. The gag, when Athenril pulls it free, stinks of something beyond saliva and sweat and the flecks of blood staining the fabric. She wrinkles her nose. It’s a powerful sedative, more poison that cure, and if it’s been in Bethany’s mouth longer than an hour-

Athenril tosses it into the corner. Burning it would just release noxious fumes; she’ll take care of it later. For now, she focuses on wriggling a thin blade into the first coil of rope, shifting it until the fibers break. She tries to ignore the flies that are trying to find a way in to the flesh beneath, as well as the new fetid smell that begins to seep out. It’s going to be bad - she’s reconciled to that.

Bethany’s hands are warped and barely recognizable.

There are open sores and worse, a few fingers showing signs of gangrene. A few more hours, days, and it might have spread. Some of the wounds seem to shove down to nearly the bone. A few are spotted with the signs of maggots.

Athenril shakes her head, muttering curses to herself, and does her best to wash her clean.

__

If she’d been a stronger woman - and Athenril was as strong as they come, so she’s not entirely sure what she means by that - she would have tried to get some sort of acknowledgment before Bethany slipped away into full unconsciousness. Some sort of sign that the girl was still alive, somewhere in that mass of diseased body. Instead, Athenril only wraps her in an old but clean blanket against the Montfort chill of early autumn.

This is Orlais; Bethany  _should_  have been dressed in silks, laughing at a party, prancing through dance steps. She would have looked like a goddess with one of the silly masks that were only just beginning to fade out of fashion. A low-cut dress that clung to the curves of her waist.

But it’s sickening to think of that while Bethany sleeps uneasily nearby. Athenril gets up to get a drink.

__

“Marian?”

Athenril’s head jerks up, eyes going open and wide before narrowing. Bethany is looking around, half-risen on one elbow, chapped and cracked lips working around words she can’t find.

“ _Marian_?” she calls again, this time louder, and Athenril stumbles to her feet.

Bethany flinches and lets out a wracked sob as she approaches, and Athenril slows her pace, holding out both hands open before her, like she’s approaching a stray dog. She doesn’t approach stray dogs very often, and certainly not one calling for a missing sibling.

“She’s not here,” Athenril says, then curses herself as Bethany flinches. “I mean- I don’t know where she is. I only saw you.”

“Marian-“

“Shh,” Athenril hushes, crouching at Bethany’s side on the small, straw-stuffed pallet. “I’ll find her. Or she’ll find us. It’s Athenril- do you remember me?”

Her elven features don’t show age as strongly as those of humans, but she knows she looks different. There are lines creasing out from the corners of her eyes, and one of those eyes is beginning to cloud, a cataract spreading from an old injury. Her hair is shorn to a mere few inches. More tattoos cover her skin, still all blue but making new patterns.

But Bethany still relaxes in what has to be recognition. Athenril nods, mostly to herself.

“You’re safe now,” she says, thinking  _or as safe as home with a smuggler ever is_. She still manages a smile, though it sits oddly on her face. “I’ve got you.”

_You’re going to lose a few joints of a finger or two once my doctor gets my note, but it’s better than losing much else_. Maker only knows what’s destroying the rest of her, though. Athenril can only hope that the pocks and sores on the rest of her skin come from general ill-health and not something darker.

Bethany begins to sway, and Athenril reaches out to help her lie down once more.

“Are you thirsty?”

__

Bethany loses more than a few finger joints. The gangrene has spread further than Athenril had thought, and the little mage girl - who has not cast so much as a little flame to warm the room - loses three fingers on her left hand and two on her right. Some of the lower bone in the meat of her hand is lost, too. Bethany takes it quietly.

She’s obviously faced worse.

And yet she rallies. She can eventually sit in the house with the sounds of others working in other tucked-away rooms without flinching or crying. She can form sentences again. Her skin begins to clear up rapidly, though there are areas that will undoubtedly scar. Her own hair is clipped for the lice in it, but she takes that in stride, too.

And slowly, over many nights, she begins to give hints of what happened.

Two men, one an ex-templar going out of his mind from a lack of dust. The other was just some sort of twisted sadist who had latched onto the half-addled, half-raging cast off. Bethany and Marian had been forced to split up a week before, to reunite somewhere up in the Silent Plains, but it had been a long journey and Bethany, even though she had strengthened after leaving Kirkwall, was still not the most savvy girl. Somewhere near Arleanna, they’d found her.

The rest was murky, and Athenril didn’t press.

What mattered, though, was that she could tell Athenril where to send a message, and that Marian was somewhere to be found. And what mattered, too, was that even beyond the howling nightmares she sometimes had, other nights she slept gently. She began to smile again. Once, she even let Athenril rest a hand on her shoulder.

__

It was three months before Marian found them.

Marian, too, was much changed since Athenril had last seen her. The Champion of Kirkwall had fallen as far as her city. The brewing war had not been kind to her, nor had the ensuing chaos. She was thin, built of whipcord and agate, and her gaze only softened at the sound of Bethany’s voice.

What horrors life had brought to these two.

Athenril watched as Bethany carefully placed her truncated hand in her sister’s. There. Her duty was discharged. This would put an end to whatever hold the Hawke sisters still had on her, and she could go back and go on.

_Who am I kidding_?

When Bethany looks over her shoulder with an exhausted and shy smile, Athenril can’t help smiling back.

__

Bethany makes a noise almost like a laugh as Athenril places the scratched up salvaged mask on her nose and brow. She looks lovely in a silk dress, and Athenril doesn’t even notice her lingering disfigurements. It’s not as if she’s seen worse - she has, but this is Bethany - but  _this is Bethany_. For all she didn’t deserve it, the wide-eyed, nervous, searching little sister of Marian Hawke has accepted it. Athenril owes her the same.

Not that she owes her anything.

_Who am I kidding_?

Bethany is more at ease now around Athenril than around her calcified sister, though her sister makes her smile and laugh if only because they once shared a time where they smiled and laughed. It’s Athenril’s shoulder that Bethany rests her cheek on as the three leave Montfort in a small covered wagon provided by a friend of Athenril’s, heading south. The road wil be long; it passes the sprawling expanse of Val Royeaux’s surroundings, and they might even see the White Spire on the horizon on a clear day. They will have to cross the Frostbacks once the pass melts out, which it promises to do soon with the coming of an uncommonly warm spring. But eventually, they’ll reach a Lothering that has been rebuilt (if also moved several miles to the east to avoid still-Blighted soil).

And eventually, Athenril will decide if she’s going to go north alone to Denerim, or if she’s going to find a new way to live in a small farming town.

But that’s far off in the future.

For now, Bethany smiles, and Athenril smiles back.


End file.
